TEXAS!
After a sleepless night--too much excitement, I guess, after Allen and Maura and the grandchildren came for dinner, too much food and drink, and I got to thinking about the trip to Texas--Beth and I leave at 4:45 a.m. and stop for coffee (and tea and cinnamon bun for her) at Valero, we get to Washington Reagan National Airport about 6:15. The plane really does take off as scheduled at 8:00 a.m. and arrives at a socked-in Houston about 11:45 Central Daylight time. The flight from there to Amarillo is the first interesting part of the trip. As the weather clears from 35,000 feet (or whatever our altitude was) I can see rivers snaking their way through woods and ranches--and suddenly the scenery changes radically, and there is an expanse of flat grassland with no rivers, no hills, no stands of woods. Now, after 150 years of settlement, it is a patchwork of ranches and farms, land green, brown, grey, yellow, in mostly rectangular swatches. My God! this is what used to be the Llano Estacado, that vast sea of prairie where the herds of mustangs and tribes of Comanches roamed, the territory that Randy and I are there to survey that once covered most of the panhandle of Texas and western New Mexico.
My cousin from Seattle has arrived about an hour before me. I haven't seen Randy for 30 years, and now, like me, he is an old guy with grey hair, but over six feet tall, fit and trim, and just as tickled as I am to be meeting here on this Texas Odyssey. We have been corresponding for the past 18 months, in the course of which we discovered this common interest--the Comanches, the Llano Estacado, Palo Duro Canyon, Adobe Walls, and what-all was going on in West Texas around 1850 to about 1880. We get the rental car and drive south on Route 27 to Canyon, check into our spacious, bargain-rate rooms at the Best Western there, and go next door to the Buffalo Stampede restuarant for a late lunch/early dinner and then back to my room, where I bring out liquor miniatures from my dopp kit, and we tslk till late in the evening.
Today, we met for breakfast at 8:00 downstairs and then headed for the Palo Duro Canyon state park about ten miles west of here. I was expecting a peaceful green valley with picnic tables, a creek, and steep canyon wall maybe a hundred feet high. Well. The scope of Palo Duro is more like the Grand Canyon. It is not as deep nor the expanse as dramatic, but what it lacks in grandeur it makes up for in rugged beauty. The day started chilly (it went down to 38 degrees, I heard, last night) and sunny; beautiful clouds rolled in during the afternoon, and by 4:00 there were thunderstorms around.
At Palo Duro, we started out at the visitors' center, which has a fine collection of books about the area, statuary and jewelry by regional craft people, and several displays of local plants and animals, indian artifacts, taxidermists' rendering of birds and beasts, and so-forth. The volunteer behind the counter was the granddaughter of the foreman on the JA ranch, the first in this region, a spread of over a million acres, where there were thousands of buffalo and longhorn steer.
Then we drove down ... and down ... and down to the bottom of the canyon. Mesquite was just coming into leaf; there were delicate yellow flowers and tiny purple blossoms on bushes. We stopped and talked with several visitors from Toronto, Tidewater Virginia, and Seattle. Finally we came to an historical marker: we were on the site of the Comanche settlement raided by Mackenzie and the Rangers. They killed but few Comanches, but after the Indians fled, the troops destroyed the Indians' tents, burned their supplies of food, and captured and later killed most of the vast herd of horses the Comanches considered substance of their wealth. It was one of the most devastating victories of the Indian wars and essentially ended the Comanche reign of terror on the plains and altered their way of life forever.
It is late, and I am tired, so that's it for today. If all goes well, I'll tell you more tomorrow.
My cousin from Seattle has arrived about an hour before me. I haven't seen Randy for 30 years, and now, like me, he is an old guy with grey hair, but over six feet tall, fit and trim, and just as tickled as I am to be meeting here on this Texas Odyssey. We have been corresponding for the past 18 months, in the course of which we discovered this common interest--the Comanches, the Llano Estacado, Palo Duro Canyon, Adobe Walls, and what-all was going on in West Texas around 1850 to about 1880. We get the rental car and drive south on Route 27 to Canyon, check into our spacious, bargain-rate rooms at the Best Western there, and go next door to the Buffalo Stampede restuarant for a late lunch/early dinner and then back to my room, where I bring out liquor miniatures from my dopp kit, and we tslk till late in the evening.
Today, we met for breakfast at 8:00 downstairs and then headed for the Palo Duro Canyon state park about ten miles west of here. I was expecting a peaceful green valley with picnic tables, a creek, and steep canyon wall maybe a hundred feet high. Well. The scope of Palo Duro is more like the Grand Canyon. It is not as deep nor the expanse as dramatic, but what it lacks in grandeur it makes up for in rugged beauty. The day started chilly (it went down to 38 degrees, I heard, last night) and sunny; beautiful clouds rolled in during the afternoon, and by 4:00 there were thunderstorms around.
At Palo Duro, we started out at the visitors' center, which has a fine collection of books about the area, statuary and jewelry by regional craft people, and several displays of local plants and animals, indian artifacts, taxidermists' rendering of birds and beasts, and so-forth. The volunteer behind the counter was the granddaughter of the foreman on the JA ranch, the first in this region, a spread of over a million acres, where there were thousands of buffalo and longhorn steer.
Then we drove down ... and down ... and down to the bottom of the canyon. Mesquite was just coming into leaf; there were delicate yellow flowers and tiny purple blossoms on bushes. We stopped and talked with several visitors from Toronto, Tidewater Virginia, and Seattle. Finally we came to an historical marker: we were on the site of the Comanche settlement raided by Mackenzie and the Rangers. They killed but few Comanches, but after the Indians fled, the troops destroyed the Indians' tents, burned their supplies of food, and captured and later killed most of the vast herd of horses the Comanches considered substance of their wealth. It was one of the most devastating victories of the Indian wars and essentially ended the Comanche reign of terror on the plains and altered their way of life forever.
It is late, and I am tired, so that's it for today. If all goes well, I'll tell you more tomorrow.